


No Parenthesis

by pineapplecrushface



Series: Not a Paragraph [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Brief Mention of Cunnilingus, First Time, M/M, Mild Homophobic Language, Perhaps too much discussion of whoopie pies, Resurrection, Ritual Sex, The most reluctant orgy in history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-07 22:44:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21465754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplecrushface/pseuds/pineapplecrushface
Summary: In the deadlights, Stan has some instructions for Richie.
Relationships: Background Patty Uris/Stan Uris, Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: Not a Paragraph [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610467
Comments: 68
Kudos: 1056





	No Parenthesis

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from [since feeling is first](https://dailypoetry.me/e-e-cummings/since-feeling-is-first/). Apparently I'm an e e cummings title person now.

When Richie opened his eyes—although he didn’t remember closing them—he was in Stan’s bedroom. It was spare and neat and quiet, with framed paintings of birds on the walls and a twin spindle bed with white sheets and a dark blue blanket, made carefully every morning when Stan woke up. Richie wondered what year it was supposed to be and realized he couldn’t tell because there were never any toys lying around; staying at Stan’s house meant that before you went to sleep at nine o’clock, you had to pick everything up and put it into bins, and Stan would get very annoyed if you accidentally put a car in the Lego bin. Richie’s room was so gross his parents had instituted a monthly power wash as soon as he was old enough to make his own snacks and forget about them under his bed, so it wasn’t like he was the most legitimate critic, but even Eddie’s room had a layer of general kid junk: stickers on the window; sneakers and roller skates tumbled over one another in a pile outside his closet; clothes sticking out of the dresser drawers; a dirty old Grumpy Bear with patches of fur missing because he pulled on it when he was falling asleep. There was none of that anywhere in Stan’s house and it didn’t bother Richie—not like when he went over to his cousin Stacey’s house and everything smelled like Pine-Sol and nobody was allowed to touch any of the crystal figurines she kept in the china cabinet—but sometimes when he was eating dinner at Stan’s he was startled by how differently they had been raised and how little he understood him.

The door shut behind him, and Richie realized he wasn’t alone. His heart flew up into his mouth at the sound of careful, light footsteps, recognizable and beloved to Richie even after all these years.

“I have important things to tell you and not a lot of time, so I’m going to beep-beep you, preemptively,” Stan said, sitting down cross-legged on the wooden floor in front of Richie.

_Oh, you grew up without me_, Richie thought. He hadn’t thought it about any of the others, maybe because he had been too overwhelmed by seeing them all at once, or maybe because his mind had refused to imagine Stan as an adult. Either way it hurt to see him, the way it had hurt to drive around Derry and see the way it had grown around itself from the driver’s side of his car rather than the passenger seat. It was still Stan, in his tidy, pressed clothes, hair perpetually tousled, but he had grown into a man with a patient, kind face, and Richie wondered where it had come from, how life had treated him.

He took one of Stan’s hands in both of his, holding onto it like he might be ripped away at any moment. “Okay. I’ll be quiet,” he said. He felt like he was about to fall apart, and he hoped this version of Stan could handle that.

“There’s a ritual,” Stan said.

“Yeah, it didn’t work,” Richie said, and Stan smiled, rolling his eyes.

“I don’t know what I expected,” he said. “Listen to me, idiot. At the end of the ritual, you have to tell Eddie the truth.”

“The truth?” he whispered.

“The truth,” Stan said. “It won’t work otherwise.”

“Shit,” he said. “Do I have to?”

“Yes.” Stan’s face was soft but implacable. “Be brave, okay?”

“What—”

“Time’s almost up,” Stan said, looking over Richie’s shoulder. “As soon as you open your eyes, grab Eddie and run for it.”

“_Stan_,” he said desperately, clutching his hand.

“I know,” Stan said, squeezing his shoulder. “Listen to me, though. The clown is going to impale Eddie if you don’t get him out of the way immediately. Please tell me you’re paying attention to my words.”

“Yeah, I got it,” he said. “I’m hearing you.”

“Seriously. He will die,” Stan said.

“I said _I got it_. Jesus fucking Christ, you’re even worse than baby Stanley,” Richie said.

“I don’t have time to give a PowerPoint presentation on the history of your attention deficit disorder,” Stan said. “Just move fast.”

“I’m like the wind,” Richie started to say, but it felt like Stan slapped him across the face, and when he opened his eyes he was on his back, being shaken. He was blind for a moment before he could focus on Eddie’s face above him, full of worry in one flash of light and then joy in the next, and right as Eddie opened his mouth, Richie launched himself up and fucking booked it, dragging Eddie with him.

“What the fuck?” Eddie panted, and Richie realized he had yanked him so hard that his hoodie had come almost all the way off.

“Stanley says move your ass,” Richie said, looking over his shoulder while he blocked Eddie from whatever might be coming for him.

*

“All right,” Eddie said that evening, when they were safely ensconced in Mike’s creepy serial killer rooms above the library and all of them had had enough whisky to be loose and kind of stupid.

“All right,” Richie agreed. Bev rested her head on Ben’s shoulder and ran her fingers through Richie’s hair. He was using her thigh as a pillow and Eddie was using his stomach for the same purpose, which was as wonderful and terrible as it always had been, and he felt warm and achingly happy.

“What did you mean when you said ‘Stanley says move your ass’?” Eddie asked. 

“Well,” Richie said. “Stan and I had a very special deadlights party conversation.”

“You did?” Eddie lifted his head and Richie wished he were drunk enough to pull him back down and stroke his hair, mimicking Bev. Instead he reached down and put his finger on Eddie’s nose until Eddie winced. The giant bandage on the side of his face had been replaced by a much less unsightly patch covering his stitches, but Richie kept accidentally finding ways to bother it and make Eddie slap his hands away.

“Yeah.” He swirled the liquid in his glass. “He told me to grab you and move or you were gonna get skewered, and he told me we were gonna do a ritual. Not the one we already did.”

“Oh,” Mike said, sounding so strange they all looked at him and went silent.

“_What_,” Richie said. He and Eddie bumped against each other as they struggled to sit up, and Richie kept a hand on Eddie’s back to steady him and then just left it there because he hadn’t dared to touch his hair before and god, he wanted it.

“Okay,” Mike said. He had put his hand over his eyes. “I just want it known that I didn’t bring it up.”

“If you’re about to tell us we have to bang or we all die, I’m serious this time, I’m volunteering Eddie for that barbecue,” Richie said. Mike stayed silent for one moment, two moments, three moments. Four moments was the point at which the silence switched from _Richie, shut up_ to _Richie, you are correct and I apologize for casting aspersions on your character_.

“Wait,” Eddie said. “For a sex barbecue?”

“Yeah,” Richie said. “Spit-roasting seems appropriate.”

“I’m not getting fucking spit-roasted,” Eddie snapped. “Mike, what the fuck are you saying?”

“I found a ritual,” Mike said, and they all groaned. “I know, okay? I didn’t mean to. I was looking for something else and then I saw it and I didn’t think anything of it at the time because we were all alive—”

“Mikey, d-did you trick us into sex m-magic or not?” Bill asked. He had jokingly made Mike test his drink earlier in the evening, but now he looked at his glass and then looked at Mike again with the bleariest side-eye Richie had ever seen.

“I didn’t,” Mike said firmly. “The thing is that blood oaths come with some powerful side benefits. We could—”

“_Mike_,” Ben said, pleading.

“We could bring Stan back,” Mike said. The room was quiet enough to hear a faint cheer from the baseball field.

“_No_,” someone said, and Richie was almost surprised to realize it came from his own mouth before he added, “Absolutely fucking not.”

“Okay,” Mike said, holding his hands out to placate him, and honestly Richie was really fucking sick of Mike saying crazy shit and then somehow—somehow!—convincing them to do it anyway. “I’m not saying we have to do it. I’m just saying, the ritual exists and we could do it, and now that it’s out there, I feel like you should all have the choice.”

“Great. I choose no. I’m fucking leaving before I get ritualed into giving all my money to a cult leader and I end up spending the rest of my sad short life on an alpaca farm,” Richie said, standing up too fast and stalking across the room.

“Richie,” Bev said, and she sounded, unbelievably, like she was not thinking this was completely insane.

“Are you fucking serious?” He whirled around to look at them. They were all giving him varying levels of _Richie, be reasonable_, which was a look he was familiar with, but not when it came to sex rituals, for some fucking reason.

“It’s _Stan_,” Eddie said. Eddie. Eddie was saying those words. Eddie Kaspbrak, who had once claimed he would rather piss his own pants than kiss someone, because urine was sterile but mouths were not.

“Why?” he asked. “Why are you people fucking _like this_? What if he doesn’t want to come back? It’s not like it was an accident.”

“He was just afraid,” Ben said. “If he knew It was dead…Richie, he told you we were going to do it.”

“So what, you’re all just cool with doing some ancient fuck ritual that, let’s be real, definitely has some bullshit monkey’s paw side effect, like there’s no way we’re not gonna drag some monsters through an alternate dimension portal?” Eddie stood and approached him with his hand out, and Richie backed away sharply. “No, dude. Bang each other without me. I’m done.”

He turned around again, racing down the stairs, into the library, and then out into the dusk. He could see his rental car from the steps, and when he pushed on the clicker it lit up with a satisfying beep, but he sat on the top step and put his head in his hands and didn’t move even when someone sat next to him.

“Just so you know, whoever you are, I’m hoping you’re the fucking clown because I’m way less pissed at him,” he mumbled.

“It’s just me,” Eddie said.

“Oh, just you,” Richie choked out. “Eds, why are you okay with this?”

“Because I’d do a lot worse than have sex with my friends to bring any of you back,” Eddie said. Richie felt a hand between his shoulder blades, warm fingers stroking through his shirt.

“Aren’t you married?” It came out so much more bitterly than he had intended it, but he hoped that would be lost in the general bitterness.

“I…so is Bill. So’s Bev,” Eddie said. “If there’s even a chance—this is more important, I think.”

Richie squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head. “Please don’t do this to me,” he whispered, mortified when his breath turned into a sob at the end.

“No,” Eddie said, leaning against Richie’s side and rubbing his back. “I just came out to see if you were okay, not to talk you into it.”

They were quiet for a while. It took him a minute to notice the crickets, and once he did, he couldn’t stop listening to them. His heartbeat, which had gone so wild he could hear it bumping his breath out of rhythm, slowed.

“I have some issues,” he said eventually. “About sex.”

Eddie’s fingers curled against his back and he scratched Richie, gently but urgently. “You don’t have to explain. You don’t owe that to anybody.”

He thought of the moment Beverly had set her fortune down on the table and he had _known_. Even before they called, he had known that only death could have kept any of them from coming back. And he had loved Stan so fucking much—he loved them all so fucking much, each in such a particular way that their absences gouged holes somewhere in him that couldn’t be filled by anything or anyone else. The lonely years in between made more sense now; he had been left with a bunch of gaping wounds and hadn’t even known what caused them. Stanley was every quiet moment he had ever had, all the rare calm afternoons when he would let Stan tell him things—about birds or leaves or strange words Stan liked to collect—without saying anything in return. He had loved Stan’s clear beautiful eyes and his precise movements and the way he would sigh and say, “Richie,” when he was about to tell Richie something honest and a little mean. Stan would have grown into all that and Richie had missed out on it, and somewhere along the way Stan had died and Richie hadn’t even been there to tell him, as he had told them when then they were children, that he would keep him safe.

“I think I do owe it to Stan, though,” he said, staring at his own knees. “Look, he said I had to tell you, so here it fucking goes. I’m gay.”

“You are?” Eddie asked. “Is that—”

“You’re the first person I’ve ever said that to,” he said. It occurred to him with a flash of pain that if he could have told anyone as a kid, before he was so scared of it that he couldn’t even admit it to himself, it would have been Stan. He remembered thinking sometimes that Stan knew, that something he had said or done had given him away and that Stan could see underneath all that bluster right down to his bare, terrified bones, where he loved Eddie without hope or inhibition. But then Stan would blithely tease him about his obsession with women in sex magazines, as he called them, and Richie would relax again.

“I’m glad you told me,” Eddie said, “but seriously, dude, you don’t have to give any reason at all. It’s your business, not ours.”

“Thanks, man,” he said, sitting taller and letting out a jagged breath. “I think I’m just mad because I know I have to do it anyway. You said it. It’s Stan. How can I not do it?”

“Yeah, that’s about where I’m at,” Eddie said. “It’s just…he’s only forty fucking years old. And I loved him.”

“And we loved him,” Richie agreed.

Eddie withdrew his hand from Richie’s back, but stayed close to him, close enough that his warmth bled through their clothes and the entire right side of Richie’s body felt like it was glowing. “What if we just…I don’t know. Stick together?”

“I think that’s the general idea,” Richie said.

“No, I mean you and me. You already told me, so I can just…you don’t have to tell anyone else. We can just focus on each other,” he said. “Would that be better? If I helped you?”

“I don’t even know how this is supposed to work.” He let himself lean against Eddie, just the slightest bit, and refused to even consider his question or else—he didn’t know. Something terrible. He’d have an aneurysm, probably. “Do we literally all have to fuck each other? Are we kicking it hetero style and poor Bev has to suffer through all our old asses humping on her?”

“I didn’t even think about that,” Eddie said. “Shit. I can’t focus on more than one person at once, and I do _not_ feel like having everybody watch me and Bev go to town. This is why I wanted it to just be you.”

“Not Ben?” Richie asked.

“No,” Eddie said, and Richie waited for him to qualify his answer, but he didn’t. “What about you?”

“In some alternate universe where Ben wanted to bang anyone but Bev?” Richie asked. “No. If we have to do this, I’d rather be with you.”

“Well, good,” Eddie said, sounding a little strange. “I know you don’t want this—like, even more than the rest of us don’t want this—so maybe we can make it easier on each other.”

“I will definitely pretend it’s your mom,” Richie said, and then sighed. “I can’t really get away with that anymore, can I?”

“I don’t fucking know why you ever thought you could,” Eddie said. “Should we go back in?”

“Yeah.” He stood, putting his hand on Eddie’s elbow to help him up without thinking about it until it was too late. “Stan’s not getting any less dead. We should probably go for it now while we’re all here.”

Eddie brushed off his pants. “You think he’ll be mad?”

“For missing the orgy? Nah, he’d have volunteered to be the lifeguard,” he said as they went back into the library. “I don’t know if this will even work, but he’s the one who started it. Maybe he wants a second chance.”

“I know I do,” Eddie said, and Richie wanted to know what he meant by that, but the moment passed when he was trying not to stare at Eddie’s ass on their way up the stairs.

*

“All right,” Richie said, pacing back and forth around stacks of books, which seemed to be all that was holding up Mike’s fairy tale horror tower. He passed by a pile of Lee Iacocca biographies as tall as his waist. “As much as I know you’ve always wanted a piece of this amazing ass, I don’t think I can fuck all of you. Eds and I were thinking—”

“Easier to do it in pairs,” Ben said. He and Bev still sat on the floor, leaning against the loveseat. Bill was sprawled out on it, his arm thrown over his face, and Eddie sat perched on the arm. Mike, leaned as far back in his desk chair as he could get without tipping over, gave Ben a considering look.

“Does that c-c-c-count?” Bill asked. His stutter had begun to recede again almost as soon as the clown was dead, but Richie noticed it crept back in when he was nervous. Understandable, Richie thought. He kind of felt like his entire body was stuttering.

“There aren’t really any directions,” Mike said, rubbing the back of his head. “It just says that the people who made a blood oath can unite to bring one who has died back to life.”

“Unite,” Eddie said, pointing at him. “Doesn’t have to be sex, right? We could just do the oath again.”

“That would be nice, but no,” Mike said. “This is intended to do the opposite of creating death. There were pictures. We all have to, uh, come to completion.”

Richie stopped pacing and took off his glasses, rubbing one hand over his face. “Oh my _god_,” he groaned. “Okay. Okay. This is for Stan. We can do this. I’m gonna close my eyes and think of Eddie’s mom and then we’re never talking about this again.”

When he put his glasses back on, Eddie was looking at him carefully. “Fuck you, dude,” he said, standing up and clapping his hands. “All right. Let’s get this shit over with. Who’s got condoms?”

“I hate this. I hate this,” Richie mumbled. “I have some in my bag.”

“Wow,” Bev said. She hadn’t said a word since he and Eddie had returned, but now she smiled up at Richie with more than a hint of the old _I double dare you_ look she used to give him when they were about to do something stupid.

“You know what, fuck you guys. You’re all fucking married or whatever. I’m on the road all the time and I never know when someone’s gonna lose their mind and want to have sex with me,” Richie said. “I don’t even want to be here. I should fucking make you drive back to the hotel to go get them.”

“Hey,” Mike said, sounding like he was on the verge of laughter. “It’s fine. I have some.”

“And, uh,” Bill said. His arm was still thrown over his face. “Other stuff.”

“Other stuff?” Richie asked, knowing exactly what he meant.

“Lube, dumbass,” Eddie said, giving him that careful look again. He was following Richie’s lead, which would have made Richie love him even more, somehow, if he weren’t also vibrating out of his skin with fear.

“Oh, right, I guess some of us are gonna have to…Do we even have to do it like that?” Richie asked, turning toward Mike. “Wait. Couldn’t we all just jerk off, or whatever?”

“Like I said, it really wasn’t clear,” Mike admitted. “Except about the orgasms. The author spent a lot of time on that. I think we should just stick to, you know, penetration? Just in case.”

“Right, sure, classic orgy rules,” Richie said. He bit his trembling lip, trying to breathe, and jumped when Eddie grabbed his hand. Mike wandered into the bathroom and his absence made Richie realize how the energy had risen, how it always collapsed a little when one of them left. It was always like that with the seven of them, all that power he had taken for granted then and didn’t know what to do with now.

“Hey,” Eddie said. “It’s all right.”

Richie shot a glance at the ceiling. _Stanley, if you come back, I hope your dick is on sideways_, he thought. “It just feels unfair. What if we all had vaginas?”

“Fingers, Rich,” Eddie said. “You’re gonna have to use them on me anyway.”

“I’m what now?” Richie clutched Eddie’s hand really, really hard, but he didn’t even wince.

“Unless you want to flip for it.” He pulled Richie toward the window, away from the others, and made a little _don’t worry, I got this gesture_ at them. Richie really wanted to be pissed that he was being handled, but it was Eddie, and also he needed to be handled right now because there were condoms and lube on the table and Eddie had just said Richie was going to have to finger him.

“You don’t have to,” Richie said.

“I already,” Eddie said, moving closer and lowering his voice. “I already know I like it.”

Richie had a sudden, unwelcome vision of Eddie getting fucked by some unseen woman, and everything he had somehow managed not to let himself feel about Eddie’s marriage kicked him right in the fucking dick. “Oh,” he said, breathless with jealousy.

“So just.” Eddie made a sharp gesture with his hands that Richie chose to interpret as _Just shut the fuck up and put your dick in me_ _for the purposes of this sex ritual_.

“Yeah, all right.” He blew out an unsteady breath. “All right. We can do this, right? I assume you’ve had sex before. It’s been a while for me but I have also had sex. We’re adults who know how to do this.”

“It’s been a while for me too. Like, a long time,” Eddie said. He was still leaning in very close so the others couldn’t hear, and Richie wanted to pull him closer and realized he was actually going to have to do that exact thing. _I’m going to be naked with you. Oh my god, I’m going to make you come_, he thought, alarmed as hell.

“How long?” he asked, and then wondered if he wanted to know the answer because he sincerely didn’t think he could handle Eddie being both married and smug about it.

“I don’t know, a year maybe,” he said, biting his lip and flicking his eyes up to Richie’s face and then back down to his chest again.

“_Shit_,” Richie said, and felt guilty about the hard rush of happiness that swept over him because Eddie looked confused and sad. He grasped him by the shoulders and said, “Well, let’s get down to bone town.”

Eddie scrunched up his entire face in amused disgust, which was what Richie was aiming for, and when he pulled himself out of their little huddle he saw that they were the only ones still fully dressed. Bev met his eyes as she peeled off her jeans, holding onto Ben’s shoulder for balance, and he gave her a little salute that made her smile.

“Okay, uh,” Eddie said, looking anywhere but at Richie and tugging off one sleeve of his hoodie. “Just don’t fucking laugh at me.”

“_Same_, dude,” Richie said with feeling. He unbuttoned his shirt, staring down at his own hands and staunchly not thinking about a goddamn thing, but he couldn’t stop running through the logistics and realized there were some considerations to be made. “Dibs on the loveseat.”

“Oh yeah, good,” Eddie said, patting his arm. “Get in there before Bill tries to grab it.”

Bill, leaning against the side of the loveseat to take off his shoes, sat up and spread his hands. “W-what the fuck?”

“Back off, Denbrough, I called it,” he said over his shoulder. “There is no part of me that can have sex on the floor anymore. I hurt myself getting out of my fucking car.”

“It’s fine, I’m gonna get some pillows and blankets,” Mike said, and Mike was completely naked already, which was just—Richie turned back to Eddie and they shared a wide-eyed, almost hysterical glance before Richie saw that Eddie had already taken off his shirt and was undoing his pants.

“Oh, come the fuck on,” he groaned. He had been half hard since the moment Eddie had admitted he liked getting fucked, and he could feel his cock stiffening fast just from the knowledge that Eddie was taking his clothes off and he was going to—god, he was going to fuck him. He was going to _fuck him_. Congratulations, you filthy little gnome, he told his thirteen-year-old self. This is nothing like what you wanted but it’s as good as you’re ever gonna get.

“Did I not _just say_ don’t laugh at me?” Eddie asked, breathing hard, his face pinched. Richie could see his erection distending the waistband of his boxer briefs, visible through his open fly. God, he wanted to kneel and kiss the line of soft dark hair under his navel, bite very gently at the tip of his cock through the fabric.

“Trust me, I’m not laughing,” he said. “Except maybe at myself from thirty years ago for befriending a bunch of assholes who go to the gym. Look at your fucking arms, man.”

Eddie shook his head, flustered but pleased, giving him a brief, sweet smile before he shoved his pants down and said, “Hurry the fuck up, dude, come on.”

Richie took a deep breath and just yanked all his clothes off at once, kicking his shoes haphazardly away and throwing his shirt and pants and underwear after them, and then—well, he and Eddie were standing naked in front of each other, so close Richie could feel his breath against his neck for a moment before Eddie startled him by moving in and resting his forehead on Richie’s chest.

“I’m kind of, uh, overwhelmed by all the hot naked people in this room,” he whispered, laughing a little.

“Yeah, no, hiding in my chest is a good choice. You won’t find anything hot there.” He put a hand on Eddie’s bare shoulder and tried not to notice anything, just to remain blissfully unobservant so he could get through the next hour without ruining anything he cared about, but Eddie’s skin was warm against his and they were both so hard and—god, it was just too fucking much to take in.

“Do you want me to kiss you?” Eddie asked. He shivered when Richie ran his fingers over the curve of his neck.

“You don’t have to,” Richie said, wanting it more than he’d ever wanted anything in his entire sorry fucking life. “It’s fine.”

“Okay. Just let me know if that’s something you want.” Eddie straightened and pushed at him until the backs of his knees hit the loveseat, and he sat down with a bounce. A part of him was noticing the microfiber of the loveseat and a part of him was hearing Bill say _oh_ in a voice that sounded like he was surprised something felt good and a part of him was hoping Mike had some industrial strength fabric cleaner and a part of him was realizing that the body brushing against his ankle was Ben, not Eddie. All parts of him were in shock.

_You get so nice when you’re about to get fucked_, Richie almost said, but managed to stop himself just in time. “I don’t know,” he said instead. “Kissing seems kinda gay.”

“You’re so dumb.” Eddie’s lips twitched into the most reluctant smile Richie had ever seen. He glanced down and to the right where Richie was trying—and failing—not to watch Ben’s broad shoulders between Beverly’s thighs. She gripped his hair tight in both hands and arched under him, moaning through gritted teeth, one long leg around him, and when Eddie met Richie’s eyes again he was blushing all the way down his chest.

“What the fuck?” Richie mouthed, and Eddie shook his head. 

“Unfair,” he said as he straddled Richie. The slide of his bare inner thighs against Richie’s hips and the outsides of his legs, soft skin and rough hair and firm muscle, was probably going to be the thing that actually drove him crazy, he thought. He couldn’t remember being this sensitized to someone else’s body since the days when Eddie would unwittingly torture him by climbing into the hammock on top of him, and it felt so much like this—he didn’t know, _couldn’t_ know how close Richie was to breaking down just because they were touching.

“I can eat you out too, if you want to balance the scales here,” Richie said without thinking, and Eddie gave a startled gasp and went very still except for his cock, which jerked between them. Richie tried not to look, he really did, but it was right there, right in front of him, hard as a rock and very wet. As he watched, a drop of clear liquid slid down the length of it. Richie squeezed his thighs together for a moment, praying to whatever deity was in charge of staving off premature ejaculation. He managed to stop staring long enough to look up and see how the not-dick parts of Eddie were doing, but Eddie wouldn’t meet his eyes. 

“Shut up,” he whispered. “Don’t say a fucking thing, I swear, Rich. Just put your fucking fingers in me and say nothing.”

“Uh, Bill,” Richie said.

“I can’t talk to you while I’m doing this,” Bill said in a strangled voice.

“I don’t want a conversation, dude, just pass me the—” The bottle hit his arm, followed by a handful of condoms that scattered all over the place, and he grabbed the lube and poured some—too much, but he didn’t want to have to go back for more—into his left palm before he got the fingers of his right hand nice and wet. It occurred to him that it might have been easier for Eddie to finger himself, certainly easier than having Richie do it for him, but they both seemed to understand that Richie would do it without even discussing it.

“Hey,” Eddie said, and Richie realized he’d spaced out a little, listening to whatever the fuck Ben was doing with his mouth. It seemed safer than tuning into Bill and Mike, although that was hard to ignore because Bill was _loud_, a fact Richie had never fucking wanted to know about Bill, ever. Also, if Richie had to be totally honest, while he only had the vaguest idea what you were supposed to do with a vagina, he had sort of neutral, friendly feelings toward them. _Good for you, Bev and presumably also Bev’s clitoris_, he thought, but Eddie was touching him under the chin to tilt his face up.

“Sorry,” he said, although Eddie didn’t look angry. He seemed—well, he seemed turned on, which brought Richie right back to the problem at hand.

“Don’t worry,” Eddie said, drawing Richie’s hand between his legs. “Just focus on me. We’re alone, all right?”

Richie nodded and shook his head and nodded again and ran his fingers around Eddie’s entrance, not wanting to startle him, but Eddie closed his eyes and arched at the touch and Richie realized two things at the same time. The first was that Bill was so, so fucking loud. Seriously. He had shoved his face in a pillow but it hardly seemed to matter. The second was that maybe Eddie might want this, a little bit. Cautiously, Richie pressed his middle finger inside of him and Eddie rocked against him, impatient.

“Rich, go faster,” he said, his voice ragged. “Please.”

Richie helplessly obeyed, sliding his fingers inside him with the intention not to spread him open but to make him feel good.

Eddie nodded and bit his lip hard. “Yeah, like that,” he said thickly. He put his arms around Richie’s neck and bent his head so their foreheads touched, and before Richie really knew what was happening, Eddie was fucking down onto his fingers fast, with no rhythm, several steps ahead of Richie in his desperation.

“_Oh_,” Richie said, finally getting it, and he let himself touch Eddie at last, sliding his free hand down his back—his skin was so hot; he was shivering and Richie wondered if it was because of the cold room or because he was being touched—until he was cupping his ass, squeezing it hard. Eddie leaned in even farther, like he was collapsing against Richie, and pressed his face into his neck, mouthing his collarbone and muffling his moans there. Richie quickened the pace of his fingers, slipping into him again and again, knowing it felt good, knowing he liked it, knowing—god, knowing it was getting him off so hard that his thighs were actually trembling.

Richie restlessly rubbed his back and his ass and tried not to thrust up because if his cock came into contact with anything he thought he’d probably go off, but they were moving together nonetheless until Eddie’s hips were bucking hard, trying to get more. He was so wet that his cock had dripped all over Richie’s wrist and—and his own cock, _Jesus fucking Christ_, Richie thought, his eyes rolling back in his head as he realized his thighs and his dick were messy and slick with Eddie’s come. He could feel the hot pull in his abdomen and his breath started to come faster just as Eddie began to tighten around his fingers.

“Stop, stop,” Eddie gasped, putting his hand on Richie’s arm. “We can’t—can’t come yet.”

He sat up with heavy, staggering movements, panting, and found one of the condoms that had fallen into the loveseat cushion, opened it, and slid it onto Richie’s cock before Richie had even processed the fact that he could have made him come just with his fingers. He cried out at the firm pressure of Eddie’s hand around his cock and then just sort of kept on moaning because he couldn’t stop, his head flopping back onto the loveseat and his fingers clenched tight on Eddie’s hips, when Eddie shifted forward a few inches and then sank down onto him.

“_Eddie_,” he said wildly, his voice rising and hitching like he was about to cry, which he honestly thought he might be.

“Fucking Christ.” Eddie dropped his head onto Richie’s shoulder again. “It feels so good. Rich, it feels so good, I can’t—I can’t—”

“It’s good?” Richie asked, bewildered.

“Yeah, just—_oh_, don’t move. I’m too close.”

“Okay, okay,” Richie said mindlessly, pressing his lips to Eddie’s neck and holding him, breathing through the tight hot pressure around his cock. But they were both right on the edge, and as soon as Eddie started to move he knew neither of them could stop.

“Richie, please,” Eddie moaned, low and strained like he was trying so hard to stay quiet until he couldn’t help it anymore and dissolved into short, unsteady _uh, uh, uh_ noises. He started to come the moment Richie pulled him down onto his cock and rocked up into him, and Richie was only a second behind him, lost in the beautiful tight drag around him and the hot, jerking spill of come all over his stomach and most of all the fact that it was Eddie—it was _Eddie_—

And even as he thought it Eddie lifted his head and kissed him, uncoordinated and desperate, murmuring Richie’s name in an absolutely shattered voice against his lips, and they wound around each other tight, shaking in each other’s arms and he was gone, he was fucking _destroyed_ in love with him and he whispered it into his ear: _I love you, I’ve always loved you. Please don’t hate me. I love you so much_.

The power went out.

“Okay, I think it’s working,” Mike said in an exhausted, fucked out voice that Richie never, ever thought he would have to hear from any of his friends. Richie was yanked out of the tight circle he and Eddie had created between themselves, looking around frantically. There was no light anywhere for a moment, not even from the windows, and he pulled Eddie closer against him. Then something began to glow, and he realized it was their hands. The lines on their palms were emitting white light, hot and tingling, as if something were flowing through them.

“Grab hands,” he said without meaning to say it, the words pushing out of his mouth like they were white light too. “Guys, we have to make the circle again. Leave a space open for Stanley.”

He grabbed Eddie’s hand on one side and reached out for Bill’s on the other, grasping onto him as they all moved closer together. Somewhere along the way he and Eddie separated, but he almost didn’t notice in the rush of power that flooded through the room, Mike to Eddie to Richie to Bill to Bev to Ben and then out, out into the space where Stanley should have been. The room was still dark but Richie saw, very clearly, a silhouette sketched in light against the window. The tingling in his hands grew, vibrating up and down his arms, up out of his throat until he was sure he was screaming but he couldn’t hear it over the hum that rose higher, higher—sawing agonizingly through his eardrums, drilling into his brain as he shook his head back and forth—until it left as abruptly as it had arrived, releasing them with a snap.

The power came on again, and the darkness that had shrouded the room lifted. The six of them sat panting on the floor, naked, and after a minute or so Richie knew they were all looking to him to break the silence somehow, but he couldn’t think of a fucking thing to say. He was sore and sweaty and disgusting and cold and kind of concerned that he didn’t know where the condom had gone, and he’d had about two hours of sleep total in the past three days. He had nothing left in him.

Eddie still held his hand.

He jumped to his feet, far too fast for a naked man who didn’t walk anywhere when he could drive. “I have to,” he said, looking around for his clothes and finding them a few feet away. “Ah.”

“Richie,” Mike said.

_Goddammit_, he thought as he pulled on his underwear and then realized they were on backward and tried again. _I’m gonna have to throw these clothes out too. I fucking like these pants_.

“I think—we probably should stick around to see if Stan…if something happens,” Mike said.

“Gotta go,” he said, shoving his feet into his shoes without lacing them up, and getting the fuck out.

*

He texted from inside the car, after he had checked underneath it and in the backseat and trunk to make sure he was alone in the vehicle. That was one habit that had stuck with him all this time, and he had never thought to question it. _You get mugged or something?_ his manager asked after he had witnessed this ritual for the first time, and he had said, _Nope, just hoping to find some groupies_. It had begun in the summer of 1989 when he had made the mistake of looking in the mirror on the passenger side of the car and saw George Denbrough grinning at him from the back seat, and here he was twenty-seven years later still sure he would adjust his rearview mirror and see a dead boy there. There was caution and then there was justified terror, and he was finally starting to realize how much of the latter he had absorbed like a slow-acting poison.

_I’m just going to shower at the hotel. I’ll be back in a little while_, he wrote in the group text, although he and Bev and Mike were the only ones who still had working phones. It had taken him six replacements to finally start keeping his phone in a waterproof, shatterproof case. Clownproof too, he thought. He could be a great spokesperson for iPhone. His had survived axe murdering a dude and then dumping the body in one of the big old drains in the Barrens Ben had called Morlock holes, swimming through sewer water, a jump in the quarry, probably his own urine at some point, if he had to be honest, and now—well, now an orgy. His phone had seen some shit.

_That’s a good idea_, Bev replied, and he took off. He had booked his room for a week and was really fucking annoyed to find out it was nonrefundable, but he was grateful for it now, on day…whatever the fuck it was. Three? Had he been here three days? No, two. Two, according to his phone. _You’re my best friend, phone_, he thought, and then thought he had better walk back to the library because while his blood alcohol level was probably not literally over the legal limit, metaphorically he would blow a breathalyzer up. 

His shower was dreamy and so was the slow, rhythmic drying off afterward. He had no clean pants left in his bag and decided everyone could go fuck themselves if they complained about his pajamas, so he threw on sweats and a t-shirt and a flannel over that. Kid clothes, he realized. He had probably worn this exact outfit every day when he was twelve.

The hollow, malleable feeling wouldn’t last forever, but he let the lack of sleep and the nonstop, hammering rise and fall of fear and pain and joy and whatever the fuck that ritual had been just flow right through him for now. He hadn’t been so relaxed without chemical help for years, he thought as he walked out of the Townhouse. The good old fucking Townhouse. It was one of the few places that didn’t have that doubling sensation of the past trying to overlay itself on top of the present, because he had never been inside it before. There was a spare room and a foldout couch in the cellar of the Tozier house, so there was never any need for visiting friends or relatives to avail themselves of the Derry Townhouse, and honestly nobody ever wanted to visit Derry anyway. They always did family day trips to Freeport, which was a different sort of torture, but at least there was a Ben & Jerry’s.

Beverly joined him as he walked through the back parking lot and headed for the library.

“Hey,” she said, hooking her arm through his.

She seemed as calmly exhausted as he was, and they barely spoke as they walked. He wanted to, a little bit, but there was too much there and he was too tired. He only said, “You think it worked?” and she said, “Yeah.” He nodded and they wandered in silence through the cold spring night air. It wouldn’t be hot at night until July, which was when his parents had started to gently bicker about buying air conditioning units for the bedrooms every year and never ended up getting them. Richie remembered being kind of glad. It was a rite of passage to sleep on the screened in porch and watch lightning cross the dark purple sky in the distance, waiting for the first summer storms to come through and break the heat.

Ben was waiting for them on the library steps, and they sat beside him in silence. Bev leaned against him and he put his arm around her.

“Bill and Eddie?” Richie asked, and Ben jerked his thumb toward the library. Richie couldn’t tell if that meant they had stayed and showered in Mike’s apartment, or if they had gone to the hotel and returned already, but his mind glanced away from Eddie easily. There would be time to think about that later, when he had dealt with everything else.

He wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting there, leaning back on the steps and looking up at the sky without really seeing the stars, but he was alone when Bill opened up the door and said, “S-Stan’s on the phone.”

*

The two of them raced up into Mike’s rooms hand in hand. The others didn’t so much as look askance at them; he reached his other hand out blindly and someone took it when they had opened up the cluster around Mike, sitting in his desk chair with his phone held out at selfie length, so he and Bill could slip in.

“Richie’s here,” Mike said, and angled the phone so Richie could see Stan’s face.

“Hey, asshole,” Richie said. He let go of Bill and pushed his glasses up, wiping his eyes a few times before he realized it was no use.

“Where are you?” Mike asked. “Are you okay? Do you need us to…I don’t know, come pick you up?”

“No,” Stan said. It looked like he was in a bathroom. “I’m in Georgia. That would take a while. Guys, it’s like it never happened.”

“Like you never…” Ben began.

“Like I never,” Stan said. “I woke up two hours ago on my couch, and my wife said, ‘You fell asleep without finishing your puzzle,’ and I sat up and it was a completely different puzzle from the one I was working on the other night. I have no idea what I’ve been doing for the last two days, but nobody else seems to have even noticed.”

“Except us,” Richie said without meaning to, his voice cracking, and shit, everybody was crying but he was really heading into breakdown territory. “Sorry. Jesus.”

He turned his head away for a minute to try to get himself under control and realized it was Eddie who had grabbed his hand, and it was Eddie who pulled him close and guided his head down so he could sniffle into his shirt. God, he was so tired he was verging on delirium. The threads in Eddie’s hoodie seemed to be individually petting his skin, and he felt himself sinking into the rumble of Eddie’s voice when he said, “I can’t believe you’re really okay, man. _Are_ you okay? Like, are you really?”

“Yes,” Stan said. “I can’t…I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. My mind just went absolutely black the moment I hung up with you, Mike. I don’t know how to describe it.”

“I know,” Beverly said. “Don’t apologize because It got you.”

“I left you all to go after It alone. I broke the circle,” Stan said, and Richie lifted his head from Eddie’s shoulder.

“No,” Richie said. “You didn’t break the circle. If I hadn’t seen you in the deadlights, Eddie would be dead, so don’t fucking say you didn’t show up, because you _did_.”

Stan shook his head. The bathroom lights were too bright, and Richie could see every line in his face, the fine sheen of sweat, every red filament in his bloodshot eyes. “I don’t remember any of it,” he said, his voice shaking. “I woke up and I knew It was dead but I don’t know how.”

Richie waved his hand. “Whatever, alternate universe Stanley, whoever the fuck it was, it was still you. You told me how to save Eddie and you told me how to save you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the fucking MVP.”

“We can fill you in, if you want,” Ben said. “You up for a Losers visit sometime soon?”

“Like, in a f-f-few days?” Bill asked.

Stan let out a short, wild laugh. “Yeah,” he said, pushing his hair off his forehead. “I could use that.”

“We’re serious if you are,” Mike said. “You want to figure out what to tell your wife?”

“No. I have never lied to her,” Stan said. “And I never intend to. I think she knows…something. She’s always known, like I’ve always known something was wrong. Not with us, but with something outside of us.”

“Wow,” Bill said. “Well, they c-can’t have us all c-c-c-committed, right?”

“Uh, yeah they can,” Eddie said. “Let us know how that conversation goes, all right? I just want to make sure I’m nowhere near Georgia.”

“Oh no,” Stan said, with that little smile that Richie had always loved because there was something mischievous in him when you dug down deep. “I’m going to Skype you all in so you can answer questions.”

“All right. Text a lot, Stan the Man,” Mike said. “Seriously. Tell us you’re okay as often as you can, please. We love you.”

They all echoed it, and Stan closed his eyes for a moment, looking thirteen years old again with his lips trembling. “I love you all too,” he said. “I don’t know what you did to bring me back, but thank you.”

“We’ll tell you everything later,” Mike said hastily. “Good luck. See you soon.”

They were all quiet for a moment after Stan hung up.

“I can’t believe we fucking did it,” Eddie said finally. He still held Richie’s hand, and Richie wondered if he had forgotten he was doing it until he tried to pull away and Eddie’s fingers tightened around his.

“I can’t believe anything that’s happened in the last two days,” Ben said. “I’m more exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Richie, who was swaying on his feet, nodded his agreement.

“Let’s head back to the hotel. I need to sleep for about twelve hours,” Bev said.

“You can ride with me,” Eddie said, and it took Richie a second to realize Eddie was talking to him specifically. “You’re about to fall down.”

“I’m gonna, uh,” Bill said. “Stick around here. Help Mike c-clean up.”

When they were in Eddie’s car—small, black, built like a tank; Richie wondered if it was his before he realized it had to be a rental—Richie said, “Do you think he’s really gonna clean?”

“Knowing Bill and Mike? They’ll start off cleaning and end up summoning a fucking demon,” Eddie said.

“Hm, I figured they’d just start banging again,” Richie mumbled, already mostly asleep with his head mushed against the window. Eddie patiently led him up the stairs to his room, helped him kick off his shoes and take off his glasses and fold back the blankets and sheets and slide underneath them, and sat on the bed beside him, looking for all the world like he was ready to stay awake all night again.

“Sleep,” he said, running his fingers gently through Richie’s hair.

“I’m sorry,” Richie murmured.

“For what?”

“Because I love you,” he said.

“It’s all right. I forgive you,” Eddie said, and Richie slept.

When he woke again, Eddie was coming out of the shower and it was five in the afternoon, which was weird.

“Did I just sleep eighteen hours?” he asked, rubbing his face.

“No, you just slept six hours,” Eddie said. “Come on, let’s go to Nan’s. I’m starving.”

“I can’t believe that place is still around,” Richie said, sitting up and groaning. “I can’t believe you only let me sleep six hours. Did _you_ sleep, gremlin? Are you even allowed to eat after midnight?”

“Ha fucking ha,” Eddie said. Richie tried to ignore the fact that he was clean and smelled good and that he had just been in Richie’s shower, but it was difficult when he was in the foggy bathroom and _Good morning, asswipe_ was written in the steam on the mirror as he was brushing his teeth. He almost ended up pissing on the floor when the previous evening’s events returned to him in full just as he was trying to empty his bladder. What in the actual fuck, he thought, staring at the faint drips in the white paint over the toilet. He felt like a video game character who hadn’t recharged enough to be able to take on the upcoming battle, but every few minutes or so he remembered that Stanley was alive and that made everything almost bearable again.

Nan’s was just two blocks up Main Street. Eddie’s old house was a block in the other direction and he remembered feeling like it was an almost insurmountable distance to get there from his own house, which was, he realized, less than a quarter of a mile away. He had spent the first fifteen years of his life right around the corner from Eddie and Bill and Stan. _Stan is alive_, his brain cried jubilantly again. Dawn was spreading over the sky and he could smell diesel from a big rig, a smell that reminded him of being on the highway early in the morning on vacations with his parents. It wasn’t entirely pleasant but the feelings it called forth were happy ones, and he was flooded by them, these things he hadn’t been able to remember or feel before. He missed his parents suddenly with a little wave of keen love and grief, so much deeper than anything he had felt before. _Jesus Christ_, he thought. _I’m going to have to reconsider my entire life. I thought I was about as deep as a fucking lagoon and it turns out there’s at least an Olympic size pool down there._

A lot had changed in downtown Derry—LaVerdiere’s, they discovered, had been bought by Rite Aid, and Freese’s was now a Hannaford—but Nan’s remained unchanged.

“This is the same fucking menu,” Richie said. “And I think—yeah, I drew this dick on the underside of the table in 1987.”

“Your dicks were always so anatomically incorrect,” Eddie said, and smiled up at the waitress when she brought them water and coffee for Richie. “I always wondered if you had ever even seen one because they looked so weird.”

“I wouldn’t expect a plebe like you to understand my art,” Richie said. The waitress had brought three creamers, which was not enough to drown out the taste of diner coffee, in his vast experience. “Okay, I need this coffee to be beige. Look around for more cream.”

“Rich,” Eddie said.

“Eds, focus. There’s more half and half in this diner somewhere.”

“Jesus Christ. Here,” Eddie said, grabbing the bowl from the table behind them and setting it in front of Richie. “Have some coffee smelling milk, you baby.”

“I will, thank you,” Richie said. “What’s up with you? You’re all over the place.”

“I have to tell you something,” he said, wiping his palm on his thigh. “This is really difficult, so just—shut the fuck up a minute, okay?”

“Yeah, all right.” Richie sat back and took a sip of his coffee while Eddie glared at it like it had insulted his mother.

“When we were younger,” Eddie said, taking a deep breath. “I was in love with you. I didn’t even remember it until I saw you again, but I was fucking crazy weird in love with you.”

Richie set his coffee down hard enough to spill it. “No,” he said.

“What?” Eddie stopped in the middle of pulling napkins out of the dispenser. “You can’t tell me _no_. They’re my fucking feelings.”

“I can tell you that it’s not fucking fair to say shit like that,” Richie said. He stared at Eddie hard for a second, then snatched the napkins out of his hand and mopped up the coffee.

“What does that even mean, fair?”

“You,” Richie said, throwing the wet napkins at him, “are fucking _married_. That is what that even means. You don’t get to—learn something I didn’t even want you to know, and then throw it back at me.”

His lips were quivering sort of hard when he was finished, and he put his coffee cup up to his mouth to cover it, staring out the window.

“What I was trying to say,” Eddie said with the alarming calm of someone who is thirty seconds from dumping an entire cup of coffee on another person’s head, “is that I was in love with you, and I never loved anyone else.”

“Good for you,” Richie said, blowing on his now cold coffee.

“Including my wife.”

Richie finally met his eyes. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“Because I’m not going back,” Eddie said. “I mean, I probably will literally go back. I have a lot of stuff there. But figuratively.”

He made a gesture that was somewhere between flicking an imaginary pest away and blowing something up. Richie had no idea what it actually meant. He opened his mouth to ask whether Eddie was going to buy a motorcycle and drive across America, because he already knew exactly what kind of response it would earn him, but the waitress returned with their omelets and a whoopie pie. He unwrapped it and ate it first while Eddie watched him with a pained expression.

“Okay,” he said after a few minutes of licking all the cream out and then nibbling around the edges and then sucking the chocolate off his teeth. “Is this because of the orgy? Because a lot of emotions happen in an orgy.”

“Like you’ve been in more than one,” Eddie snapped.

“Yeah, I was in one and I felt a lot of emotions. That’s how I know.” He wrapped up the remaining half of the whoopie pie.

“I think my marriage was over the second Mike said, ‘Hi, it’s Mike from Derry,’” Eddie said, looking down at his plate like he didn’t recognize it. “I remembered you first. I was standing next to my car, waiting for the tow truck, and all of a sudden I thought _Richie Tozier_, and it all just…”

“Stabbed you in the kidneys of your soul?” Richie asked. Eddie looked confused for a second, but nodded.

“And then I saw you at the restaurant and I was just so fucking _mad_, you know?” Eddie set his fork and knife across his half-eaten omelet and pushed it away. “You still make me laugh even when you piss me off and you still…”

“Still what?”

“Still make me love you, no matter what.” He took a sip of his water and looked miserable.

Richie’s hand was already across the table and holding onto Eddie’s before he had given it permission, and Eddie grabbed onto it and held tight, his eyes big and sad and just a little bit hopeful.

“It wasn’t like I had it bad,” Eddie said. “I thought even if I couldn’t feel, you know, really romantic love, I could still care about someone, still want to be part of a team. That’s what marriage is supposed to be like. It’s supposed to be the two of you taking on the world, right? But we’re not even friends. We just protect each other from having to face…whatever. The world. People. My bullshit health problems.”

“And you haven’t had sex in a year,” Richie said.

“Of course you would focus on that,” Eddie said, letting his hand go. He was trying not to smile, though. Richie knew that look. “No, we don’t really care about sex.”

“I think you care about sex a lot,” Richie said.

“Yeah, which is news to me,” Eddie sighed. “We just weren’t…like, we would have done it again eventually. Probably. We talked about it sometimes. It was just such a hassle for a few minutes of something that doesn’t even feel as good as a massage.”

“It’s never felt like, you know, sex ritual sex before, but most of the time it feels better than a massage,” Richie said. He wanted to feel triumphant, but instead he just felt desperately sad thinking of Eddie all those years, not feeling good, not being touched the way he wanted. Thinking he didn’t need love, or even friendship.

Eddie kept his eyes on the table, slowly turning red. “It felt good when I was by myself,” he said. “Don’t laugh.”

“You’re looking at one of the world’s innest gay dudes, man,” Richie said. “I know repression. My closet is like a fucking labyrinth, only instead of a minotaur at the center, it’s me talking about fucking your mom.”

“That is my actual nightmare,” Eddie said, smiling faintly. “Let’s get the fuck out of here, huh?”

Richie grabbed the check over Eddie’s protests, which were strident enough to catch the attention of the early morning mill workers, who watched them the way an alligator watches something it isn’t interested in catching…yet. Richie knew they were thinking it, that word that had haunted him across thirty years and three thousand miles. Queer, as in _you’re queer_, pronounced _yaw queeyah. _Sometimes, if the offense were particularly egregious, it might be _you're wicked queer_. Richie was always wicked queer.

He didn’t sense any real physical malice from anyone, but pasted a bland smile on his face anyway and distracted Eddie by giving him the rest of the whoopie pie on the way out of the diner.

“I don’t even like these,” he said, pulling back the cellophane, delicately sniffing, and starting to eat it.

“Yeah, no, I can tell,” Richie said. Without any particular aim, they headed in the direction of the Townhouse. “So you don’t want to go back. What do you want?” 

“I know that I don’t want to fuck around,” he said. “I’m over halfway through my life expectancy and I’m not wasting a fucking second on things I don’t care about anymore. So yeah, there are some things I want. Well, one thing. I want you. I mean, if you actually want me.”

They had turned left on Jackson, and were wandering down the side street toward Richie’s old house. “Shit,” Richie said, staring down at the white sidewalk. There was a little chalk drawing of a purple flower there, crooked and enthusiastic. He was sweating, trying to breathe and wondering if this was a punishment for five straight years of making fun of Eddie’s inhaler before he figured out a joke that made Eddie even more apoplectic with rage. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either.” Eddie threw his hands in the air. “Literally last night we fucked our brains out and you said you loved me. I know it was stressful but like, that did _not_ feel like it was just handed out under pressure.”

“_Eddie_,” he said through gritted teeth. “I have been in love with you since first grade and I’m telling you _I don’t understand_. When did this even happen?”

“Oh,” Eddie said. “I can tell you the exact day, actually.”

They walked past the Toziers’ old house without lingering. The new owners had painted it a dark terra cotta color and added shingles, which were green. His parents would have hated it, he thought, and then noticed they had taken out the bushes in the back, under which he had hidden a bunch of weird old-timey porn he had gotten from a high school boy named Danny Rivers for ten dollars. Danny had found it in his grandmother’s attic after she was sent to the retirement home, and Richie was the only taker. It wasn’t great, he had to admit, but it was the first time he had seen naked men in pictures and not just women, and at thirteen, that was enough. He couldn’t remember if he had thrown it away before they moved. A part of him kind of hoped someone had gotten a really strange surprise while uprooting the elderberry shrubs.

“All right,” he said. “What was the day you succumbed to my raw animal teenage magnetism? All the teeth and the zits and the knees? I had like twenty-five knees.”

“You have no idea,” Eddie said. “You came over to show me the new Fangoria and, I don’t know, you were being really, really fucking annoying that day. And I told you—”

“I remember,” Richie said abruptly.

“How do you even know what I was going to say?”

“I just do,” he said. “I remember everything that happened that day.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what happened, then,” Eddie said, stopping and crossing his arms over his chest. “Since you’re the expert.”

“It was right after Betty Ripsom disappeared, and I _was_ being really, really fucking annoying. You asked me what the fuck my problem was,” he said, swallowing. “And I said I was having a hard time finding your mom’s vagina, and you said…”

He couldn’t believe he could remember it so clearly, sitting on the floor of Eddie’s room with the magazine spread out on the carpet, reading it with one knee pulled up to his chest and the other twisted underneath him—god, what he wouldn’t give to have that kind of flexibility now—and Eddie behind him on the bed reading the previous month’s issue.

“I wish you’d just fucking disappear too sometimes,” Eddie snapped. “I swear to god, I wouldn’t even miss you.”

It had been one hell of a shitty day. He’d woken from a nightmare at three in the morning and been unable to get back to sleep, and had been such a jittery asshole all day at school that he had three detentions, even though he had promised his mother no more detentions for the rest of the quarter. Worse, however, he had accidentally cut in the lunch line in front of Moose Sadler. Moose had said nothing, just delivered a solid, hard punch to the stomach, and Richie had fallen to his knees and gotten a hole in his jeans, and then after his detention he walked home to get yelled at for the detention and for the hole in his jeans and for not doing his homework over the weekend. After supper he had run off to Eddie’s house only to realize he couldn’t stop being Richie Tozier for five fucking seconds because his brain felt like it was on fire. All of that was bad and then—well, Eddie was too much sometimes too.

“Are you _crying_?” Eddie had asked, sitting up.

He was. He tried to hide it while he threw his magazine in his backpack and pulled on his shoes to leave, but he was crying like a stupid fucking baby. He had one shoe on when he felt Eddie sit down behind him, a tentative hand on his back.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. “I didn’t mean it.”

And honestly Richie kind of wished Eddie would keep being mean, because he could have handled that a lot better. Instead, he stopped trying to mess with the laces of his sneakers, which kept pulling the wrong way and coming undone instead of tightening, buried his face in his hands, and bawled his stupid eyes out.

Eddie made a distressed _tsk_ noise and said, “Shit, I’m such an asshole,” and pushed and pulled at Richie until he had tugged his glasses off and set them gently on the floor and then hugged him tight. Richie hated crying as much as any thirteen-year-old boy, but he didn’t hate being held, and he didn’t hate Eddie petting his hair and the back of his neck and whispering, “I couldn’t stand it if you were gone, Rich. I’m sorry, it was a dumb thing to say.”

He felt like a gawky giant, and was embarrassed enough to pull away before he was ready so he was still sobbing and wiping his face when he tried again, unsuccessfully, to put his shoes on.

“No, hold on,” Eddie said desperately, getting up and running out of the room. He came back in with a wet washcloth, tissues, and a towel, kneeling in front of Richie and holding the tissues out to him. “Here, blow your nose, but do _not_ throw the tissues on the floor.”

He stretched out behind him to snag his trash can, almost overbalancing, and stuck it next to Richie’s leg. Richie tried to stop crying so Eddie could tend to him, staring at the carpet until he had calmed down into painful hiccuping breaths while Eddie wiped the cold wet cloth over his face.

“Please don’t think I want you to really disappear,” he said, finally looking Richie right in the eye. “You don’t think that, do you?”

Richie shrugged. Up close, he could see the way the corners of Eddie’s mouth turned down, an almost certain indication that he was about to cry too, which would just cap off this gangrenous taint pimple of a day.

“I _don’t_,” Eddie said in a high, wobbling voice. “I’d hate it if anything happened to you.”

“You would?” he asked.

“Yeah, dumbass,” Eddie said, his eyes round with surprise. “What the fuck do you think I’m doing when I ask you to come over, torturing myself?”

“You put up with me because Bill and Stanley put up with me,” he said.

“So you don’t even think you’re my _friend_?”

He shrugged again, feeling around for his glasses and finally finding them right beside the dust ruffle. Oh, how he had teased Eddie about that dust ruffle. “I know you guys don’t hate me, or whatever, but it’s like a habit. Every group has a funny one. That’s me.”

“You’re not funny,” Eddie said. He was still really close, kneeling in front of him and patting his cheeks with the towel. Richie obediently turned his face up so he could get his neck too. “And you’re really stupid. You think I just hang out with anybody? I’d tell you to fuck off if I didn’t like you.”

“You just told me to fuck off,” he said, grabbing the towel to stop Eddie’s hand and looking away. He could feel his eyes burning and blinked hard, knowing Eddie could see how his lower lip was quivering and hating himself for letting it get to him again.

“But I didn’t _mean_ it,” Eddie said. “I’ve told you to fuck off a million times before.”

“Whatever,” he muttered. “I’m just having a bad day.”

“Well, stop it.” Eddie gave one last gentle sweep of the towel over his mouth and held it there. “Even when you piss me off so much I want to shove you under a bus, I don’t want you to go away. Don’t ever tell anyone I said this, but I don’t hate having you around.”

“No, I’m telling everyone the next time you say _Trashmouth, I don’t want to hear your hilarious jokes anymore, get the fuck out_,” he said in his high-pitched Eddie voice, trying to smirk and almost getting there.

“I don’t sound like that,” Eddie said, but he was grinning. He put the towel down and hugged Richie again, and Richie hugged him in return this time and sighed against his shoulder. Eddie was great at hugging because he threw himself completely into it, and he was so fussy about everything that came near him that being a thing Eddie wanted to touch would have been a gift to him regardless of any stupid romantic feelings. What he remembered most about it later was the feeling of contentment; he had no desire for anything more in that moment, only Eddie’s arms around him and the knowledge that Eddie actually sort of liked him.

He could probably still be satisfied with only that, he thought.

“I wish that memory had disappeared permanently,” Eddie said.

“Like I said, it was a bad day.” He pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know why it upset me so much. It just did.”

“Rich, it was the worst thing I’ve ever said to anyone in my _life_,” Eddie said.

“And that’s what made you realize you liked me?”

“Yeah. It was like—you never seemed like you gave a shit, ever. I could say anything to you and you just bounced right back, like you didn’t even notice me unless you were insulting me,” Eddie said. “That’s why I fought with you all the time. I wanted you to _pay attention to me_.”

Richie found himself smiling down at the sidewalk. “Yeah,” he said. “I know that feeling.”

“But I didn’t really know why until then. I’m serious, you never seemed like you cared what I thought, and I fucking hated it. Then I realized you had actual feelings that could actually be hurt, _by me_, and it was all over.” He shook his head. “I was so fucking in love with you. I swear, by the end of that summer, if you had shown up at my window and asked me to run away with you, I’d have already had a suitcase packed.” 

“Jesus,” Richie said. “You cry on a man’s shoulder one time.”

“You gave me…a boundary.” Eddie looked frustrated for a second. “You made me feel _so much_, all the time. I was always dialed up to eleven when I was with you, just constantly hyped the fuck up. But I hurt you and I realized I never wanted to do it again, and later that night I was like, ‘I never want anything to hurt him,’ and like a week later it was, ‘I want him to feel good,’ and then it was, ‘Oh, I want to _make him_ feel good,’ and then it was daydreaming about kissing you, and you were still such an idiot, _god_, you were so stupid, but all I wanted was to redo that afternoon so instead of being mean to you, I could have kissed you.”

“I would probably still have cried out of horny terror,” Richie said. “And then you would have been mad and never kissed me again.”

“No, I would have kissed you even if you’d slobbered on me. Which you would have. You were so gross.” Eddie’s smile was soft but didn’t entirely include Richie. He seemed to be smiling at his past self, and maybe past Richie too.

“Well, I’m glad you’re hot for my snot,” Richie said. “I was in love with you too. Obviously.”

“Oh, obviously,” Eddie said, rolling his eyes. “Like I was just supposed to read your mind.”

“You fucking should have,” he said. “I'm not subtle. I'm still in love with you, _obviously_.”

“Good,” Eddie said, grabbing his hand, sticky from the whoopie pie. “Because I’d still run away with you if you asked.”

“_Should_ I ask?” He studied the neat piles of broken down branches and sticks set by the road, waiting to be picked up along with the garbage and recycling. 

“Yes,” Eddie said firmly.

“All right.” He stopped and turned to Eddie, pulling his hand up to kiss it. “Will you run away with me, please?”

“Where?” Eddie asked.

“Anywhere but here,” Richie said. “But I was thinking maybe we could try Los Angeles.”

Eddie watched him gravely. The sun was just starting to really assert itself for the day, and it cast tree shadows on his face but his eyes were very clear in the light. “I can do that,” he said. “I do have to go to New York for a few days first. The only reason I haven’t been fucking flooded by phone calls and texts is that my phone is at the bottom of the quarry. I have a lot of things to take care of.”

“We don’t have to go to California,” Richie said. “I’ll go anywhere with you. I’d go to Ohio. That’s how much I love you.”

“Would you kiss me in front of my old house?” Eddie asked. He smiled, but it was still a little serious, like he knew he was asking for more than just a kiss. “I thought you might want to piss off the spirit of my mom.”

“Oh.” Richie could feel heat rising in his face, and without thinking about it—without looking around to see if anyone was watching—he moved into Eddie’s space, cupped the back of his neck, and leaned down to kiss him. It was slow, and the moment Eddie shivered and slid his arms around Richie he felt like he was like sinking into joy, somehow. When he pulled away Eddie’s face held the same expression, like he knew. Of course he knew, Richie thought. They had made this circle, unbreakable and endless.


End file.
